This mail has been written for ISAR's International Newsletter &
effectively appeared in Vol. 204-a (Nov 6, 2002) in a truncated version.
Please, find below the entire version. Hope it will be of some interest
for Exegesis members.

We have to agree with the recent postings of Blake Finley and Bill
Mayer, as we observe with some amusement the pathetically defensive
kneejerk reactions that they have provoked. It is evident that not only
numbers of young people, but also those of all ages, are either unable
or unwilling to attend such grandiose and expensive conferences. Many
are simply not interested in participating in what tend to be in
numerous cases the summer re-runs of the tedious and unimaginatively
redundant conferences of years gone by.

It is well-known that a highly rigid cadre of antiquated and incompetent
true believers is controlling most everything in today's prevailing and
torpid popular astrology scene. Not only are new points of view and
fresh perspectives unwelcome at contemporary astrological conferences,
but attendees are force-fed the same old boring and static recycled
material.

Anyone expressing any creative or original ideas is either shunned as a
heretic or shamed into silence. It is the same situation everywhere, in
the U.S., in the U.K., in France...

We would add that the U.S. community may have a curious image of what
constitutes astrology in France, just by noting the "French" astrologers
engaged at the next conference: Lynn Bell, an American who is hardly
known in France (by the way, we have nothing against this individual),
and pop media astrologer, E. Teissier.

It must be asked if any kind of serious research at all is ever proposed
or discussed at these gatherings, which tend more to resemble in their
mentality a hybridization of the standard backwoods fundamentalist
revival meeting crossed with a senior citizens' bingo game, rather than
serious assemblies which might foster any kind of genuine intellectual
inquiry. This pertains not only to ISAR, but to all conferences of which
we are aware. We submit that the prevailing astrological community (if
such a group can really be said to exist beyond that
which provides a limited social identity for a small, often culturally
disenfranchised minority of practitioners and students) is very far away
from the requirements necessary to engender any kind of scientific or
intellectual RESEARCH, whether in a conference format or in any kind of
established learning environment.

For such a focused and productive discourse to ever, in fact, take root
in any fertile soil, would require a direct confrontation with the
doctrinal mentality of the self-appointed Astrological Inquisition
which, in its narrow and rigid fashion forbids any challenges to the
arthritic, even intellectually atavistic tendencies of an orthodox
astrology. Any discipline which forbids discourse in which people agree
to disagree for the sake of a lively exchange and for expansion of
knowlege is inexorably doomed to the state of stuperous calcification in
which we see today's astrology lingering.